The Guitar in America: Victorian Era to Jazz Age

Introduction

- 3 - - INTRODUCTION 0 I n the second half of the twentieth century, the guitar became America’s instrument. In the hands of innovators like Les Paul, Charlie Christian, Merle Travis, Jimi Hendrix, and a host of other players, the instrument helped define—and was in turn defined by—America’s music: country, blues, jazz, and rock in all its varieties. These players and their music did not develop in a vacuum. They had predecessors, they were heirs to traditions; and, if we do our homework or our fieldwork, we can find their roots, discovering stylistic bloodlines. In Maybelle Carter’s “Wildwood Flower” we hear the hillbilly roots of honky-tonk, country and western, and Chet Atkins’s popularized Nashville Sound. In Robert Johnson’s plaintive singing and playing we hear B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and a multitude of other bluesmen and women. In the bluesy jazz lines of Eddie Lang or Lonnie Johnson, we hear premonitions of the steady work of Freddie Green with Count Basie or Barney Kessel in the studio as well as the sophisticated jazz stylings of Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Jim Hall, and others. None of these musical examples really surprises us; each makes sense, musically and historically, in light of what we know followed. This history of the guitar in America is really a documentation of musical genres, a history built principally on recorded performance. The guitar’s ubiquitous use in America’s recorded popular music has dictated how its players and fans understand its origins and its story. Contemporary players and fans look to the past for the roots of their own music, tracing the guitar’s stylistic history in this country backward from the most recent performances on CDs or MP3 files to its earliest manifestations on LPs, 78s, or cylinders. In this telling , the guitar’s recorded sounds echo the various musical dialects of America’s popular musics. And the histories of the guitar based on these recordings has consistently described the instrument as a tool of the folk, its repertoire an oral tradition, its heroes and heroines unschooled troubadours who used their instruments, as Woody Guthrie used his, to fight fascism, as well as racism, sexism, colonialism, and commercialism. In this history, the guitar, an equal opportunity instrument, was a social and cultural leveler. INTRODUCTION - 4 Until recently, guitar fans (and even some scholars) consistently projected such a late-twentieth-century interpretation of the guitar’s place and role back into the nineteenth century. They often glossed over the years before the 1920s, assuming that the nineteenth-century guitar functioned as the steelstring “acoustic guitar” (that is, the non-electric guitar) did in the late twentieth century. In this view, the guitar has always been an instrument of the “folk” in America, its music transmitted orally, its function to accompany “folk songs,” its associations primarily with blues-playing blacks, rural string bands, and cowboys.1 This anachronistic view regularly projects late-twentieth-century approaches to the instrument—including steel stringing, a plectrum technique, and a lack of formal notation, among others—onto earlier players and their repertoire. The advent of the electric guitar in the late 1920s and early 1930s established the direction of the instrument in this country for the rest of the century ; as significantly, the electric guitar assumed an iconic role in American musical culture. Steve Waksman’s recent study of the electric guitar reflects this approach, drawing on Jacques Attali’s work to interpret the instrument as a tool of the cultural outsider whose noise challenges the status quo. In this story of the guitar in America, informal and accessible performance trumps formal and elite concerts, oral transmission negates standardized notation, and loose, improvised structures dominate formally composed works; the guitar becomes America’s instrument from the bottom up, helping the outsider tell his or her story. This history of the guitar expands the instrument’s connection to the “folk,” linking it to musical stories of repression and resilience (in blues and country music) and more recently rebellion and transgression (in rock and its various offshoots). Studies of American popular music regularly emphasize this transgressive character of the guitar, celebrating its role in breaking down musical and social barriers, emphasizing the iconic and the mythological.2 Indeed, the language of popular histories of the guitar regularly utilizes the mythological. Players are described as heroes while stories of training or performances range from the apocryphal to fantastic. These mythologies resonate with many deeply held beliefs about America...